Page 15

T he next morning, I was running on adrenaline and the bitter coffee from the dining hall. My head banged hard against the desk. I hissed, rubbing the sore spot as Dorian sneered beside me. I hadn’t noticed I’d fallen asleep, and I wiped away the drool with the corner of my sleeve.

Unfortunately, my timetable had confirmed a brutal reality. I had early morning Angelic History with the Upper Sixth, which meant an hour trapped with Dorian Cavendish. Great.

“ Relax , Davenant,” Dorian laughed. I felt my cheeks heat as I straightened, my vision still hazy with the need for sleep and potential bloodloss.

He looked too good for this early hour. His uniform looked pristine, ironed, not an immaculate hair on his head out of place.

No visible signs of guilt from drinking my blood traced his face, either.

Just that same smug arrogance. Maybe that was what bothered me most. “You’re not still sore about the other night are you?

” His voice pitched low. “It was just a game.”

I clenched my jaw. “You’re sick.”

He leaned back in his chair, wrist dangling over the desk in the most insufferably casual way. “Fair’s fair this late into term,” he chided. “It’s your score, or mine.”

“Whatever that means,” I shot back.

He let the moment hang, then shrugged. “Don’t worry. I’m not in the habit of feeding off classmates regularly. Tempting as you are.”

I glanced away, jaw clenched. There were few things in this life I had ever found as infuriating as Dorian Cavendish.

“I’d like for this lesson to be a recap,” Godwin announced, entering the room with a little less cheer than usual, it seemed. His circular glasses perched between the pudge of his cheeks and wiry brows. “Do you have a slate yet, Miss Davenant?”

“Sorry?” I frowned. I was watching the door. Dante Darkblood entered, late. Godwin simply nodded once as Dante took the empty seat next to me.

“A slate .” Dorian waved an object, stone-thin and glossy as a black mirror.

“Competition is at the very heart of our curriculum. You’re ranked against the other students.

Without a slate, you should hardly know where you stand!

” Godwin chortled at that, and placed a device on my desk.

Cold leeched into my fingers the moment I touched it, a heartbeat lingering where it had kissed my skin.

It looked almost like a phone, but the technology felt somehow more and less advanced at the same time.

“Go on,” Dorian murmured. His smirk was lazy, but his eyes were hunting. “Let’s see how much time you have left.”

The moment my fingers brushed the slate, something beneath my skin hummed, like the Thread had been waiting. The screen blinked to life. I tossed it back onto the desk, folded my arms, and refused to engage. The more I learned, the harder it would be to get out. That’s what Dante had suggested.

“Respect your device, please, Miss Davenant.” Godwin frowned. He really was in a worse mood than usual. “Read the digits beneath the word ether for us.”

Ether. I hesitated, my fingers hovering over the cold glass. A tally board flashed onto the screen, flickering, glitching, before landing on three values. At the top, a single phrase blinked: Ether Scores.

“ Aloud , Miss Davenant.”

I didn’t want to. It felt like every class was designed to enmesh me deeper here, when all I wanted was the opposite. I hardly cared why my parents wanted me to attend at all, anymore. I just wanted everything to go back to the way it was.

My thumb hovered over the scores. I glanced sideways. Ruby had gone pale. Dante was unreadable. Dorian was watching me like he already knew I’d come up short.

I cleared my throat. “Present…seventy-four. Future…recalculating.” The second number wasn’t missing. It was fighting to exist, numbers rolling forward and back. It settled on unknown. “What does that mean, unknown?”

A low hum started behind my ears, like static interference.

I wasn’t sure if it came from the slate or my spiraling thoughts.

Unknown. This was all really happening. This was a school that claimed to turn humans into Angels and Daemons, and the way our lives were being tallied, tracked, and measured had something to do with it.

Ruby looked down. My fingers curled tight around the slate’s edge as I tried to swallow the weight of what I was seeing. Unknown. Not having a future was worse than being told it was terrible, I guessed. It meant no one knew what I was, even the system clearly designed to categorize me.

Dorian let out a low whistle as whispers circled the room. “Brutal.”

“Most curious,” Godwin said, forehead creasing.

He shifted his focus, just for a moment, toward Dante.

“Most curious indeed. Most of our students have a concrete score this late into term. Given the circumstance of your late arrival, though, I suppose it makes sense. You have work to do, Miss Davenant.”

“Right,” I nodded. I turned to Ruby, my voice a strained whisper. “What the hell is ether?”

She gripped her own slate too tightly. “Ether is an energy,” she whispered. “It’s the essence of our score. It’s what the Crucible uses to track everything. Too much in the red and—” She dragged a thumb across her throat. My heartbeat slammed against my chest.

“Mr. Darkblood,” Godwin interjected. “Would you care to interpret Miss Davenant’s numbers?”

Dante leaned close enough for his breath to brush my neck. I stilled.

“It’s deeply unimpressive, Professor. The ether threshold for Fates alone is two-hundred, seven-hundred for Angels and over a thousand for the Nephilim. Of course, if she is aiming to Fall, that order would reverse.”

I think I understood, now, but it sounded insane. Our scores here dictated which path we chose, or what we became . Angel or Daemon. I clicked the slate shut. I glanced at Dante’s, the numbers on his screen glowing faintly.

Present – 2,443. Future – Unknown.

Unknown too? He looked bored, like none of this applied to him. Mine was only Seventy-four. That didn’t rank for anything, Angel or Daemon.

Dorian reclined, completely at ease. His smirk sharpened. “Don’t worry, there’s still time.” His violet eyes gleamed. “Just.”

I tried to pretend his voice didn’t rattle me, but it did. All I could think about was how easy this was for him. He’d grown up in this world. I’d been thrown in blind, and I still didn’t understand how the scores made this a competition.

“Remember that fate is a hand that is always guiding you,” Godwin’s voice cracked as he spoke, trying desperately to make it sound better than it was. “And can anyone tell me why Evermore uses this scoring system?”

No one spoke, and Godwin folded his arms tight across his chest. “Dorian.” His tone was clipped, and in the way he looked at his son I could tell that Dorian was his mother’s child through and through.

“Evermore was built as a preparatory college, a place to prepare humans with viable blood, Luminari, for a place in the afterlives.” Dorian reclined, monotone, as though he’d been forced to recite this many times before.

“At the end of every year, the Rift marks the Lower Sixth for a path, Angel or Daemon loosely speaking, and weeds out the unexceptional.” He gave me a pointed look.

“When we graduate, we claim our place and the Rift takes more of us.”

“Sorry,” I interrupted. “What do you mean ‘takes more of us?’”

“Students with poor rankings die,” Dorian replied plainly. “That’s why we compete. Only those worthy Ascend and claim one of the coveted places in the After, those with negative scores Fall to Elsewhere. The rest…vanish. Eternal death, lost to us, and lost to memory.”

I felt my throat closing. The concept of this place being a school for Angels and Daemons had begun to thaw in my mind, but this was too much. The Rift, the thing I’d thought was an assessment, would kill me if I didn’t raise my score and knock another student from the rankings.

“The ether system keeps score,” Dorian continued. “It measures you, your impact. It’s everything. Good deeds, bad intentions, veneration, betrayal. Doesn’t matter. It all feeds the Crucible. The more ether you carry, the closer you are to Ascension. The lower…”

Ascend or Fall. I stopped listening. I thought of the mural. The steps sweeping upward, then crawling downward. Upward to the After, I assumed. Downward to Elsewhere. I didn’t know what my parents had been thinking, sending me here. Maybe they hadn’t known. Maybe they had.

“Professor, my father works for the council in the After. He’s away of course, but no matter,” a girl piped up. Lilibeth. “He said?—”

“Of course,” Godwin interjected. “Archangel Raphael. I am aware.”

“He said there are only six spots this year.” Lilibeth’s tone was frantic. “Double that, twelve in Elsewhere. If that’s right, that’s lower than ever.”

Six. Of the fifty-odd students that made up the Upper Sixth, only six would graduate to the After. Twelve to Elsewhere, if that was somewhere you even wanted to go. The walls seemed to close in. Was Dorian joking? He had to be.

Godwin loosened his tie. His cheeks were ruddy, his forehead damp. “The competition is ever-worsening. The soul economy is very real. But as a Nephilim Angel myself, I want to reassure you that fate is guiding you, whichever way your path winds.”

“Hold on,” I said, my ears were ringing. “I’m not sure I’m understanding. The afterlives,” I let out a weak laugh. “You can’t mean that literally.” Every head snapped in my direction. “What if I just wanted to graduate, and go home?”

“I thought you understood what Evermore was,” Dorian sneered. “What about this isn’t clear? ”

“The death of it all,” I ground out.

“Death,” Godwin said lightly, although speaking about the weather. “Death is a graduation pre-requisite, Miss Davenant. Half the soul is taken in Lower Sixth, the remainder in Upper Sixth.”